The Spindlers Read Free Page B

understood. She and Patrick were the only two people Liza had ever met who knew, who really believed, that the real world was not just grocery stores and park playgrounds, textbooks and toilet paper. They knew that it was gnomes, and spindlers, and different worlds, too.
    â€œAnd why is that?” Mrs. Elston said.
    Liza swallowed hard. “Because I’m too old.” She gripped the broom handle. She shifted from right to left. She imagined she was skating.
    â€œExactly,” Mrs. Elston said. “Go put away the broom, tuck yourself into bed, and go to sleep, like a good girl.” She turned to Mr. Elston. “Robert? A little help?”
    Mr. Elston finally looked up from his book. He squinted at Liza from across the room. “Listen to your mother, Liza,” he said, and returned to his book.
    It was too much. That was the problem with grown-ups; they told you not to lie, and then got angry when you told the truth!
    It was not fair . Liza burst out, “But I’m not making it up! The spindlers really did take Patrick. That thing in his bed—it’s not really him. It only looks like him. I told you so this morning, and you didn’t listen, and I knew you wouldn’t listen, because you never listen, which is why I’m going looking for him myself.”
    Liza shut her mouth quickly, feeling breathless. She knew at once she had gone too far. She never raised her voice to her mother—ever.
    The color drained from Mrs. Elston’s face, as though someone had just filled her to the brim with milk. “You’re very bad to speak to me that way, Liza,” she said sadly.
    Liza felt a flare of guilt, and tried to squash it by feeling angry again. But she couldn’t. She could only feel guilty, and then sorry for herself, and sorry for her mother, and sorry that she had made her mother sorry, and then guilty again.
    â€œNow go to your room,” Mrs. Elston said quietly. “We’ll talk about this in the morning.”
    Liza squeezed the broom handle, turned, and ran up the stairs.
    At the top of the stairs she paused. Her heart was drumming in her chest, and it seemed to echo the words still running endlessly through her mind: notfair notfair notfair .
    The only light came from a small, single night-light, which burned just outside the bathroom and cast a faint red circular glow on the carpet.
    She could turn left and go down the hall to her own bedroom, and curl up safely in bed with the broom next to her footboard, and sleep safely and soundly, as her mother surely would have wanted her to do.
    Or she could turn right and go down the hallway in the other direction to her brother’s room, and she could keep watch over the monster, and see if she could find out what had happened to the real Patrick.
    â€œI am not afraid,” Liza said quietly to herself, and forced her body to turn to the right. “I am not afraid,” she repeated, and took one step, and then another. She was alarmed by how quickly she came to Patrick’s door, with its smudgy door handle and various scrawled pictures of alien ships and underwater animals taped across it.
    I can still go back, thought Liza. I can look for the real Patrick tomorrow .
    But she knew that tomorrow might be too late.
    Instead she reached out and grabbed the doorknob; then she eased open the door and slipped into the blackness of her brother’s room.
    It was perfectly quiet except for the heavy pounding of Liza’s heart. The normal Patrick would have been snoring loudly, and snuffling, and rustling about in his bed; Liza could hardly stand to share a bed with him when they went on vacations. He would kick and toss all evening.
    But the not-Patrick slept soundlessly and in perfect stillness, like a stone. Liza reminded herself that he might as well have been a stone. Soon he would break apart completely, and then there would no hope for his rescue.
    The warm, glowing center of him—the live